Lisa Cacari Stone, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Health Policy with the Public Health Program in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and Senior Fellow with the RWJF Center for Health Policy. Her research interests span across a range of social determinants of population health.

Her investigations encompass the macro-level determinants of health and access to health care (e.g. migration, immigration policy, political ideologies), to the community level (e.g. social and contextual influences of substance use for immigrant women), to the individual level (e.g. psychosocial risks factors for hypertension management among Latinos).

Her studies along the U.S.-Mexico border have involved multi-disciplinary collaborations (e.g. economics, medical sociology, anthropology) with community and academic partners to develop and evaluate evidence-based interventions and policies that promote health equity. From 2010 to 2012 she was the Principle Investigator for a Comparative Effectiveness Research project in collaboration with Hidalgo Medical Services (NIH/NIMHHD). This two-year project evaluated and compared a primary care/community health worker intervention to just primary care for medically underserved Latino rural border residents diagnosed with hypertension.

Other recent projects include a bi-national comparison of Mexican women’s perceptions on access to health care in two colonias in the Paso del Norte region, a study of county-state policy responses to health and welfare eligibility and benefits immigrants in the U.S. and the impact of the Affordable Care Act on access to health care for vulnerable children and families in New Mexico.

Dr. Cacari Stone is Director of the Community Engagement Core under the P20 funded Disparities research Center funded by the National Institutes of Health and was elected to the Expert Research Panel of the U.S.-Mexico Border Health Commission and is currently a fellow with the Kaiser Permanente Chris Burch Minority Leadership Program.